Contents tagged with OpenAjax

I’m flying to San Jose tonight for tomorrow’s OpenAjax Alliance face to face meeting, which Microsoft is hosting. On Friday, we are also hosting a new event that aims at establishing a dialogue between JavaScript library developers and Microsoft. We’ll have talks from the IE, Visual Studio and ASP.NET teams, as well as talks from members of the community. This should be very interesting.

The OpenAjax Alliance has been working with some of the top Ajax developers on a wishlist that aims at gathering and prioritizing the development features that we need the most from next generation browsers. The process is completely open and Wiki-based, so feel free to contribute.

Yesterday I got to write our entry in OpenAjax's InteropFest. The goal of this event is to demonstrate how different Ajax libraries can be parts of the OpenAjax ecosystem and interact with each other through the OpenAjax hub. The currently central feature of the hub is to expose a publish/subscribe message bus so that both producers and consumers of events can speak through a third party that is neutral to specific Ajax implementations.

When building Ajax applications, you basically deal with two kinds of events. First, there are DOM events, and second, events from JavaScript objects. This second category is not part of the EcmaScript specs (or of the DOM specs, of course) so each framework needs to define its own pattern to expose events. This makes it more difficult for developers to include components built on different frameworks into a single page, which is one of the problems that OpenAjax tries to solve. I'll get back to this in a future post and show how to integrate Microsoft Ajax events in the OpenAjax hub.

It was my great pleasure to be at the face to face OpenAjax Alliance meetings for the first time last month. Thanks to the nice people at IBM for hosting them. I really enjoyed the discussions with Alex from Dojo, Gideon from OpenSpot and many others. There were also great demos of OpenAjax-based interoperability.

I'm extremely pleased to announce that we're joining OpenAjax today and that I'll represent the company in the organization's meetings starting this Thursday. This is a way for us to ensure that our user community can combine the Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions with other frameworks, today and in the future. Interoperability in the browser is a hard problem but it opens key Ajax scenarios. An industry-wide organization such as OpenAjax is a great way to ensure this goal is met in the long-term.